OAI-SearchBot
OAI-SearchBot is OpenAI's crawler that indexes pages for ChatGPT's search feature, making it the user-agent to allow if you want to be cited in ChatGPT's answers.
OAI-SearchBot is the crawler that makes you citable in ChatGPT search. Unlike GPTBot, which gathers training data, OAI-SearchBot indexes the web so ChatGPT can retrieve and cite live sources. If you want ChatGPT to surface your pages, this is the bot to allow in robots.txt.
The distinction matters for the access pillar and for making an informed crawler policy: you can block training (GPTBot) while still allowing search (OAI-SearchBot), preserving your AI-citation visibility without contributing to model training. Confusing the two — and blocking both to "keep out OpenAI" — silently removes you from ChatGPT's cited results.
Example. A publisher that wants ChatGPT to cite its journalism but not train on it allows OAI-SearchBot while disallowing GPTBot — a deliberate split that the two separate user-agents make possible.
Relevant pillar
Related terms
- GPTBotGPTBot is OpenAI's web crawler that gathers content to train its models, identified by the GPTBot user-agent and controllable through your robots.txt file.
- ChatGPTChatGPT is OpenAI's conversational AI assistant that, with search enabled, answers questions by retrieving and citing live web sources, making it one of the most important answer engines for AEO.
- robots.txtrobots.txt is a plain text file at the root of your domain that tells crawlers which user-agents may access which parts of your site, and is how you allow or block AI crawlers.